The Haggis Samosa: Future Pilot AKA and the music of infinite shades

Raga rubs up against dub, Celtic folk, and bhangra. Reggae versions of Scottish ballads are sung.

Sukhdev Sandhu

Disorientalism: The psychedelic assemblage of Sublime Frequencies

All three have talked about the formative experience of feeling embedded in something they couldn’t quite comprehend; of not quite understanding their mothers’ native tongues.

Michael C. Vazquez

Petrova Gora Memorial Park

David Maljkovic

Manifest Destiny

Babak Radboy

Afterthought: The open secret

Today’s rumors are characterized not by their valence (favorable or hostile), but rather by their putative relationship to truth.

Tamer El-Leithy

A Journey Into Beirut’s Dark Side: F**k the Sun

The Last Man, which premiered at Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival and in Lebanon at Ayam Beirut Cinema’iya, uses a well-known cinematic paradigm to explore Beirut’s dark side.

Tony Chakar

On Tahmineh Milani’s Cease Fire: Mr. Tom and Mrs. Jerry

Tahmineh Milani’s Atash bas (Cease Fire, 2006) recently became the highest grossing film in the history of Iranian cinema.

Vahid F. Parsa

Afghans in India and One Hotel’s Curious History: Bungalow in Bhogal

Trains run past the hotel’s garden wall all day, the lament of their horns an almost ludicrously sentimental reminder of the histories of exile and homecoming that swirl around the stillness of this unlikely half-acre of New Delhi.

Kai Friese

On Failure: Hans Ulrich Obrist, Anton Vidokle and Tirdad Zolghadr in conversation at the opening of unitednationsplaza

Part exhibition, part school, unitednationsplaza was launched with great fanfare last October in Berlin.

Tirdad Zolghadr, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Anton Vidokle

Kabul Zoo: Staring agog at the lone Norwegian pig

In the suburbs of West Kabul, where the worst of the civil war once raged, lies a curious gem. Nestled among buildings still riven with bullet holes is an incongruously smart red-brick entrance bearing the words bagh-e vahshi, literally “wild garden.”

Daniel Metcalfe

Music Pioneer Halim El-Dabh: Step Into the Electric Magnetic

He was (as a few biographers have called him) a Zelig-like character, seemingly implicated in almost every modernist project of the 20th century, a maverick or “experimental” artist, who, for reasons rarely elucidated, wasn’t deemed worthy enough to be part of the official narrative of modernism.

Sam Shalabi

Introducing Cassius Al Madhloum: Apples and Beefsteaks

“You need to paint apples and beefsteaks. They fill you up, and then you get to sell the paintings, so what you have is art education as food supply, you know what I’m saying?”

Tirdad Zolghadr

How the Art World Prospers by Never Explaining Itself: The buck doesn’t even slow down here

A friend and colleague, Ellen Langan, once pointed out the dubiousness of our referring to the goings-on of the art market as “the art world.” Ms Langan observed that, indeed, there is no doctor world, no law world, and finance is just called finance. Why don’t they exist on their own planets, too?

Mary Blair Taylor

Automatic Rumor

Is the United States military trained to interpret images? Have Predator pilots read Sontag, Svetlana Alpers, C S Pierce?

Chris Csikszentmihályi

Fake Memoirs and Truth As Style: Are you there, God?

Few childhood experiences were as torturous to me as going to confession. (What doesn’t a twelve-year-old boy have to confess?) But I was a resourceful child, and before long I had formulated a plan to combat the blushing shame the occasion demanded.

George Pendle

I Have a Cheap Plastic Camera

Maurizio Cattelan: Hello, my name is Maurizio.

Maurizio Cattelan, Roman Ondák

Sex and Stereotype on the Sub-Continent: It’s Altaf your tailor, come to take your measurements

I approach Scott Poulson-Bryant’s Hung: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America (Doubleday, 2005) with some trepidation, as if rifling through a friend’s underwear drawer.

Naeem Mohaiemen

London’s Nocturnal Blues: Beyond the bling

At night on the Thames, skippers of elderly tugboats tell horrified and delighted deckhands about the headless torsos of African girls found washed up on the shore downriver the previous week.

Sukhdev Sandhu

Tall Tales in Tehran: Dancing the polka

When I first moved to Tehran as a journalist in the late 1990s, I was scandalized by the chaos of traffic in the streets. The polluting shared taxis that seemed to hold a monopoly on public transport. I decided to devote one of my first articles to the subway — or lack of it.

Anton Karster

Schoolgirls Slowly Falling to the Ground: The Phenomenon of Collective Hypnosis

In one of Geneva’s many cafes, a Swiss cultural coordinator once asked me about the upheavals occurring in our “countries” in relation to the published Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed that appeared in various publications in Denmark and other European nations.

Yasser Abd El Latif